Sorry about the down times lately. If you have seen our messages at Dhamma Wheel on facebook, then you already know what is going on. In case anyone hasn't seen that:

We got too big!! This is a good thing; for Dharma propagation, that is. We got so big that the shared server we were using was about to crash. The web hosting company shut us down, we were so big with too many hits per day. All of the TheDhamma.com websites are tallied together in terms of hits and Dhamma Wheel (Theravada forum), Dharma Wheel, and Dhamma Wiki were receiving thousands of hits per day, overloading the shared server.

So we have upgraded to a Virtual Private Server (VPS) Gold package which means that all TheDhamma.com sites will be on their own dedicated virtual server; not shared with other sites. We should be able to handle somewhere near one million hits per day without a problem from now on. Previously I thought that there needed to be around one million posts or so here at Dharma Wheel and Dhamma Wheel before we needed an upgrade, but guess I was wrong and underestimated the amount of traffic we were receiving.

I thought I'd been kicjked off, then i did a DNS search and saw that DW was hosted by GoDaddy, which had a massive shut down problem.

It was a great teaching on impermanence!

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Profile Picture: "The Foaming Monk"The Chinese characters are Fo (buddha) and Ming (bright). The image is of a student of Buddhism, who, imagining himself to be a monk, and not understanding the true meaning of the words takes the sound of the words literally. Likewise, People on web forums sometime seem to be foaming at the mouth. Original painting by P.Volker /used by permission.

The take away lesson for me from this, is that we who make actual posts need to remember that those who read the forum and don't post are the vast majority. Therefore, we should be ever mindful about what we write.

"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget." –Arundhati Roy

Thanks everyone for the kind words. Something I mentioned over at Dhamma Wheel too:

Special thanks to our ordained Sangha members here, the moderating staff, AND all the lay people and other participants here. Any fool with a little money can start a website or forum, but it takes a great community to make it something this special. A website with no one visiting or participating is useless. It IS the community that we have here that has made this possible.

And yes, the new server is much bigger and better due to being a private server and therefore, faster. Otherwise you won't notice any changes in the format or structure, the web hosting issues are all just "behind the scenes" material that help make this work.

All beings since their first aspiration till the attainment of Buddhahood are sheltered under the guardianship of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas who, responding to the requirements of the occasion, transform themselves and assume the actual forms of personality.

Thus for the sake of all beings Buddhas and Bodhisattvas become sometimes their parents, sometimes their wives and children, sometimes their kinsmen, sometimes their servants, sometimes their friends, sometimes their enemies, sometimes reveal themselves as devas or in some other forms.